One Demolishment From Murder
Written by Kelly DeVries of ODFM Podcast.
We’re starting this story on the morning of May 8 of 2008 in Woodland Park, Colorado. Woodland park is a pretty area near Colorado Springs that has a rich history in the old west. It still maintains that air with colorful saloon-style buildings around the city. Forested mountains create a gorgeous landscape behind the town.
It’s easy to access the wilderness since it’s nestled in the mountains. A young man of 18, Joshua Maddux, grew up here and loved hiking out into the wilderness to commune with nature. A very cool area near his home was the site of an old gambling saloon which had been known as Thunderhead Ranch.
On this particular morning, May 8 or 2008, Josh told his family he was heading out for a walk. Being that it’s in the mountains, it’s still chilly this time of year, but it’s still a nice, sunny day and Josh going out for a walk or hike was pretty normal.
However, this time, Josh never returned. Josh’s dad, Mike was frantic. He had gone to work that morning and when he got home, Josh still wasn’t back. The next day came and Josh still wasn’t home. Not knowing what to do, Mike called all of his friends but no one had gotten any calls, texts or had seen Josh since the 8th.
So the dad, Mike, calls the police on the May 13th to report Josh as missing. Police are quick to mention that maybe Josh had just run away as he is an adult and no one had any reason to think there was foul play involved.
Josh has a sister named Kate. Kate describes him as a free spirit and she talked about how he had mentioned to her before about this epic adventure he wanted to go on someday soon and that he may not talk to them all for a while. She took that to mean that it would probably be some years he’d go off into the wilderness or something and maybe he just got a wild hair and decided the time was now.
So police do take it seriously though, and post missing person notices with his photo and mention that he may be in mental distress.
Just two years before this, Josh lost his brother Zachary when Josh was just 16. At the time of his death, his brother Zach was 18. Josh had cherished his older brother and looked up to him. Zachary had his own terrible mental struggle and had committed suicide the week he was supposed to graduate from high school.
This would of course crushed his entire family but it took an even heavier toll on Josh. The family was made up of 2 boys and 2 girls, Josh being the youngest of all. Zach’s death was difficult on Josh and he used his love of the outdoors and animals to help him through his grieving. He’s off the charts smart, artistic and maybe a little quirky.
He spent a lot of his free time playing music and writing fiction. His sense of style was notable and he was known as the friendly, outgoing kid who wore a top hat and brought a briefcase to school instead of a backpack.
Josh goes missing that spring and the weeks turn into months and the months into years without a word from him. His sister, Kate, chose to believe that he decided to start a new life elsewhere, needing to escape the torment of losing his brother. She hoped he’s out there writing books under a pen name living a life of solitude out in the woods.
Mike, Josh’s dad, didn’t want to give up the search for his son. He searched relentlessly for him at campgrounds and homeless shelters, always keeping an eye out, thinking maybe he’d had a mental break. He also considered the horrible possibility that Josh had also committed suicide. The grief for Mike at losing possibly both of his sons was crushing.
In Colorado, bodies turn up often of people who’d gotten in over their heads in the out-of-doors in poor weather long after they’ve gone missing. I hear it pretty consistently year after year of them finally finding the body of “so and so” in the wilderness who had gone missing months or even years before. Because of this, every time a body was found near Woodland Park, Josh’s family would brace themselves for awful news.
Mike didn’t want to move out of the family home even after Josh had been missing for years. He was worried that if they did and Josh tried to return, he’d think they abandoned him.
In Woodland Park, Josh wasn’t the only name on people’s minds when a body was found. Lucas Whyte Gordon disappeared on his 24th birthday on June 23 of 2004. The last time he’d been seen, he was dropped off by friends at a gas station. After they dropped him off, a van was seen picking him up and his mother never heard from him again. He helped support his mom and wasn’t the type to just run off and disappear. She believes someone killed him and police aren’t interested in solving his case.
I mentioned Thunderhead Ranch earlier, the old gambling saloon that Josh’s family lived near. This property had an old cabin on it that was falling apart.
The cabin had been in the local Murphy family for 60 years, bought at the end of the Thunderhead Ranch operation. The ranch had been part of After the ranch had been shut down, One of the Murphys lived in the cabin for nearly 30 years after which it was abandoned.
The main ranch building had been renovated but no one bothered much with the little cabin. Chuck Murphy, the owner, talked about how they’d occasionally go in the cabin to check it out, but it stunk with all the local critters like mice, racoons and chipmunks that had gotten in.
At some point vandals had broken in and the breakfast bar had been ripped off the wall and moved in front of the fireplace. He said there was really no reason to go in there other than to tear the building down.
In the summer of 2015, he decided to have the old cabin demolished to make room for a housing development which would have 32 single family home lots.
Josh’s family had searched all around the area, but the cabin had never been on their radar as they didn’t think it was a place he would go to.
An earth mover is brought in as this wasn’t going to be a small job. It seems they don’t bother to get rid of some of the old furniture inside the cabin before taking down the building. They get to the old fireplace and have to move that piece they described as a “large breakfast bar” that was blocking it.
After moving the bar, they could see something in the fireplace leading into the chimney. They discovered a partially mummified skeleton. It’s upside down in the chimney, in the fetal position with a hand covering it’s face. The skeleton was only wearing a sweater and the legs had been dislodged. Because of the heavy use of machinery, the body may have moved some from how it had been originally so that may have messed up the scene. Police are called and the remains are gathered. The property owner, Chuck Murphy, is told 2 days later that the death investigation was over and the demolition could be completed, which it was.
A few weeks later, Josh’s family found out the remains were those of Josh. They were told it had been a terrible accident, but that it was in no way a homicide. The coroner told them that it seemed Josh, a thin, tall teen, had probably shimmied down the chimney “Santa Clause style” to get into the cabin. But, when Josh had reached the bottom of the fireplace, an insert would have prevented him from getting out, so he got stuck. The coroner said it was hard to speculate how he died, but that it could have been hypothermia or dehydration.
Chuck Murphy, the owner of the property, wasn’t told anything about the investigation and wasn’t asked anything either. He only heard about the details of it all when he heard it on the news which gained worldwide attention for how horrifying it was. When Chuck heard the details the coroner gave about how the boy died, he knew they had it wrong.
Chuck called the coroner’s office to tell them so and lined up a meeting with them.
In 1990, the cabin had an addition built onto it which included the chimney. Being that this cabin was in a wooded area with many critters around like raccoons, Chuck had had an insert installed in with the chimney. This was a heavy iron mesh grate that was installed into the brickwork near the top of the chimney to prevent things getting in.
The investigators hadn’t seen this part of the chimney because it had been removed during the demolishment before finding the body. When the demolition crew had been working, they separated out metal from other debris and had put the mesh with that pile.
The coroner said that investigators don’t remember seeing any such thing on site and didn’t believe it had been there at the time, that probably a chimney sweep had taken it away years before or that it had disintegrated away.
However, that would have been tough since it was literally embedded into the masonry AND it’s not like it was centuries old. It had been installed in 1990, so that would have been a pretty quick disintegration of metal.
So, Chuck is like, ok, well, what about the clothes we found? Josh’s pants, underwear, socks and shoes were right outside of the fireplace ON THE OTHER SIDE of the breakfast bar. Why would Josh take off all of his clothes except for his thermal shirt (I’m thinking probably something like a Henley), go outside and go down the chimney when he’s well aware that it’s blocked from the inside?
The coroner agreed that was a real puzzler, but maybe the kid was on drugs. They did try to test for drugs, but the mummified flesh was to hard to get a clear test of. Josh’s family heartily disagreed he was on any illegal substances.
Chuck had no idea how Josh got in the chimney, but he refused to believe he did it without provocation and he’s sure he didn’t get in it from the top. He’s sure that Josh was murdered by either someone forcing to get in there or he was killed in the cabin and his body was stuffed up the chimney to hide it.
The coroner disagreed that it was a homicide, saying there just wasn’t any evidence of it. He said the hard tissues on the corpse showed no sign of trauma and there weren’t any broken bones or knife marks. Inside the chimney, there were no other items like duct tape or rope. Something like strangulation, though, wouldn’t necessarily show up in the autopsy. The coroner said that if someone had put Josh in there, that it would have taken 2 people to move him into that position.
Instead, he thinks Josh died of hypothermia because the temps on the day of his disappearance were in the 20’s that night.
Speculation on Josh’s death was further riled up when it came out that police had been fielding calls for years about an individual who had been bragging that he’d killed Josh. Rumor had it that this troubled man had talked about it not only in person, but on since deleted social media posts as well.
The suspect had a long criminal record who had spent time in jail in Texas, Portland and Seattle and had some vague legal troubles in New Mexico. He lived mostly a transient, homeless life and it was hard to put a timeline onto when he was in the Woodland Park area, let alone if he had been there during the time of Josh’s disappearance.
Police had been skeptical of these accusations being that all the info they got was just hearsay without any real evidence of times or specifics.
The spotlight on this suspect and who he actually was came out due to a poster on Reddit. The poster’s name was Gentamangina. No one knows their real name and the post is still up, but his comments line up with known evidence.
His posts are in response to a thread titled, “People who have known murderers, serial killers, etc. How did you react when you found out? How did it effect your life afterwards?”
Gentamangina says that he went to high school with a “skinny, dorky, hippy” named Andy who played guitar in a band. He said he wasn’t good friends with him but that this Andy started hanging out with his good friend Josh after they had graduated. He said that shortly after they had begun hanging out, Josh had gone missing. Andy had told another friend that he and Josh had been planning a trip to New Mexico together.
He hadn’t thought much of it at the time, until he saw articles about what Andy had been doing when he was in New Mexico. One article on CrimeSceneInvestigations.blogspot.com from 2009 had interesting info.
It stated that 21 year old Andrew R Newman was wandering around in the Houston area going door to door asking for food and water. One person had come home to find this man in their house with their 15 year old son and 17 year old daughter acting “strangely.”
He told Andy that he’d drive him to the next county, but once he got Andy in his car, he drove him straight to the sheriff’s office. When Andy’s fingerprints were run through AFIS, they matched those that had been found at a murder scene in Albuquerque on May 2 of 2009 as well as a burglary in Seattle.
They surmise that Andy had been traveling around the country by train jumping, thus getting around and away easily after committing crimes.
In Albuquerque, a man named James Wellito had become friends with Andy. James Wellito was the caretaker of an invalid man named Anothony Schneider, and whenever Andy was in town, he would stay with them. On one such occasion, James had left Andy with the immobilized man, Anthony alone with Andy while he went to take a shower. When James came back out after his shower, Andy was gone and Anthony was dead from a stab wound.
When cops question Andy, he claimed he had stuffed a woman in a barrel in Taos, New Mexico. Police in Taos know the case of the woman in the barrel, but they said they already had their man, so Andy isn’t in trouble for that one.
Andy obviously had mental illness at the time and his defense attorney entered a not guilty plea on behalf of him for the murder of Anthony Schneider. The attorney explained how he wasn’t even sure Andy knew what was going on in the current situation. He said he’d tried to talk to him, but that they couldn’t even tell if he understood what they were saying.
Then, on September 12, 2009, Andy tried to escape jail and was charged with that as well. Attempts were made to have a trial for the next few years, but on May 6th of 2010, Andy was committed to the New Mexico Behavior Health Institute to work on becoming fit to stand trial.
However, the caretaker of the man killed, James Wellito, had been killed in a bar fight, so without him, the sole eyewitness or more evidence, the trial against Andy and the charges, were dropped.
Andy was released and continued to get into trouble which looked to be burglaries, contempt charges and assault of police officers. I found one recent booking for trespassing in 2023 in Florida, but nothing too much worse than that.
Quote from the reddit post, “This is just my opinion, but I don’t care who you are: you don’t try to climb headfirst into a chimney via a hole rusted through a metal grate with your dick hanging out.”
There have been theories that maybe Josh got himself locked in the cabin somehow and figured the only way out was through the chimney, but he would have had to push the bar of cupboards out of the way and move the heatilator (a steel insert) at the bottom of the fireplace to enter it as well.
Another theory was that maybe he was suffering from hypothermia which would account for removing clothing. Another symptom of hypothermia is what’s called “terminal burrowing” which is when those who are near death from hypothermia seek small covered spaces to hide. People have wondered if he had gone into the chimney to hide from that and long after he died, someone else had moved the bar in front of the chimney.
To get more answers, the investigation would need to be reopened. For some reason, the coroner declared the death as accidental instead of undetermined. Weirdly, the coroner had been quoted as saying, “I know it’s not a natural death and I’m confident it’s not suicide. My other options are an accidental death, homicide, and undetermined cause of death. It is frustrating we can’t pin it down.” He could have chosen undetermined so that the case could be investigated at any time but did not.
History of the Thunderhead ranch — they had illegal gambling and bootlegging operations going through prohibition and beyond along with topless dancers hired from Vegas. There was a rodeo arena that was very popular and all the operations helped fun the building of a church and a VFW. At the Thunderhead inn, there was even a small cage type building where drunks and troublemakers were thrown to sleep it off.
Sources: Unresolved.me, medium.com article by Shenbaga Lakshmi, gazette.com, dailymail.uk.co, pikespeakcourier.net, unresolved mysteries thread on reddit, utepasshistoricalsociety.org
Reddit post: https://np.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/3qqy8t/people_who_have_known_murderers_serial_killers/cwhya9w/?context=3
Articles from post: http://crimesceneinvestigations.blogspot.com/2009/06/new-mexico-murder-suspect-captured-in.html
https://www.spreaker.com/episode/s13-e4-one-demolishment-from-murder-joshua-maddux--59461823
